


eulogy for a past life

by devilsalwayscry



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dreams and Nightmares, Ficlet Collection, M/M, Memories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-05 22:43:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20496548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilsalwayscry/pseuds/devilsalwayscry
Summary: In the month after their defeat at the hands of Urizen, V wanders the streets of Red Grave City, evacuating survivors and reminiscing on his past life.A short ficlet collection for VerV week.





	1. bitter

**Author's Note:**

> I'd intended to write more of these, but then mirrors consumed my life as we got very invested in that AU. I'm posting what small bits I had finished, because I rather like them. Maybe I'll get a chance to add more to this!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the theme "bitter."

It started when he was a child, when he sat alone in the half-destroyed remains of the bookstore that had always provided him with comfort, listening to the sounds of demons wander the streets, clinging to a sword twice as tall as he was. No one had come for him, then, even though he had hoped for it, against all odds. He’d hoped that his mother had escaped, that she would know to find him there. Hoped that Dante had survived, that he would come to Vergil’s side the way he always did. Hoped, even, that his father would return from wherever he had gone, knowing that they needed him.

No one came. He shivered in the dark and in the cold and he waited and waited until his stomach had hurt from hunger and he had been forced to finally take to the streets. Red Grave had been crawling with demons, but he had been afraid to stray too far from his family home, in the event that someone might return for him, and so he had fought and hid and scraped by until it had been clear that he was utterly alone.

V thinks about this now as he walks through the wreckage of Red Grave City, digging his nails into his palms and swallowing down sharp, stinging mouthfuls of bitterness that threatens to crawl up his throat. The rising of the Qliphoth has created almost a perfect replica of Red Grave after that day, a reflection of his memories of the destruction, created by his own hand. A cycle completed.

He walks because he does not know what else to do. With Dante missing, they are woefully unequipped to deal with Urizen. Nero will need time to gather strength. So V has taken to wandering Red Grave, a ghost drifting through his past, and he looks for people he can still save, out of an obligation and a sense of guilt both.

The street he is in now is old—he remembers it, vaguely, as one they had frequented during their rare trips into town. Shopfronts flank him on either side, hollowed out carcasses of human life, empty save for the dusty remains that litter the city streets. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots his reflection in a broken shop window, and he glimpses silver hair, a ratty old blanket wrapped around small shoulders, the gleam of a too large katana clutched in his fist. The bitterness clings to the back of his tongue, twisting and turning his stomach into knots.

“It was never anyone’s fault,” he says to the reflection in the glass, yet the bitterness remains—sharp, thick, nauseating. He gags when he brushes against a human corpse and ash scatters to the wind. He thinks about demons crawling through the street, eating the corpse of the woman who used to sell them ice cream when they would come into town with their mother.

He tightens his grip on his cane, swiping his thumb over the curve where the handle begins, a movement pulled from muscle memory. It doesn’t help—it lacks the same comfort as the feel of a tsuba beneath his fingertips. The memory and the reflection both fade, sinking back into the recesses of his mind. There is a reason he has come here, and that is to undo a measure of what he has already done. He continues his walk.


	2. moonlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the theme "moonlight."

At night, V dreams of a past life, a permanent occurrence since he took his nightmares into his flesh. He stands in an elaborate bedroom, plush, rotting carpet beneath his feet. At his side is a four-post bed--it reeks of blood and filth, the bed sheets stained dark. There is a mirror set into the wall, and he ignores it as he has done every night, focusing his attention instead on the vanity first, then the bedside table, and finally the glass terrace doors that spill a sickly yellow moonlight into the room. 

He stands at the balcony, waiting for the dream to end, bathed in the nauseating color of warped and distorted moonlight that filters through dirty and cracked glass. The color is off. It makes him wonder if he is the one in the mirror universe and not the thing he knows waits for him in the mirror. Is he the reflection? An illusion of something long dead and forgotten?

He runs out of things to touch in his efforts to avoid the mirror, as he always does. V finds his eyes drawn to the dirty glass, his feet propelling him forward on their own, as they always do.

He is not prepared to see his reflection. He has never once been prepared, not since he started having these dreams. It tears the air from his lungs, a punch to his solar plexus, that leaves him doubled over in front of the mirror, one hand pressed against the wall.

The thing in the mirror looks at him out of flat, dead, crimson-tinted eyes. He looks back and says, “I am not afraid of you,” even as he gags on the bitterness that threatens to choke him.

It does not answer, because its master has not given it a voice. V reaches up and touches the mirror's surface with his fingertips--he traces the side of the creature’s face, pale and run through with spiderweb cracks and inky blue veins. He follows the curve of its neck, down to armored shoulders, and although it is only a reflection--only a dream--the feeling of cold steel settles over his skin. Makes him feel sick.

Only when he has traced the full outline of this reflection, memorized every inch of steel and flesh and corruption and burned it into the tips of his fingers through the cold surface of the mirror, does he wake.


End file.
